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Critical Theory, Feminist Theory, and Technology Studies 121 standardized and reliable evidence in sexual assault cases, with one of the desired ends being to help women attain more positive judicial outcomes (Parnis and Du Mont, 1999: 76). 20 So far, so good for participation. However, Parnis and Du Mont’s analysis of both the design and utilization of the SAEK demonstrates multiple points of recontextualiza- tion (including through various professional cultures) at which social interests and values are inserted that perpetuate traditional biases rather than eliminating them or opening them to critical scrutiny. For example, the kit was not consistently administered in cases where the assault did not involve full penetration or in cases of acquaintance or spousal assault, reflecting long-standing myths about what constitutes “real” rape. As Parnis and DuMont conclude (2002, in press), “the kit may carry a legitimacy and a symbolic value which exceeds the capabilities of science to objectively determine defining the ‘facts’ of a case.” This stands as a cautionary example of how participation in technological innovation and utilization may in fact contribute to the process of interpretation being removed from political contestation via that symbolic value. Thus, the third methodological point that I want to stress is that the level of mediational analysis must attend to the complex construction of contexts for agency, including an awareness of ways in which hegemonic codes may be both subverted and/or reproduced in the dynamic relationship of structure and agency. This requires more sustained attention to the construction of both agents and contexts, particularly if the intent is to identify and nurture emancipatory potentials. While Feenberg acknowledges the feminist critique of abstract constructions of modernity (for example, via Nancy Fraser’s [1989] critique of Habermas), he seems unwilling to more fully extend that acknowl- edgment to the recognition that gender, like technology, may be under- stood as a sort of code that has profound theoretical and methodological significance. 21 This reluctance, combined with the rather weak conception of democratization as participation, further complicates Feenberg’s contention that democracy is something that can simply be extended to technology, 22 and this tends to weaken the potential of his framework for really grasping co-construction. Thus, we see an imaginary concept at work, which seems to assume that individuals enter into the democratic public already formed in their identities, with already existing (if, 6641 CH04 UG 9/12/02 6:09 PM Page 121 122 Barbara L. Marshall perhaps, latent) interests. 23 What a good deal of feminist work has demonstrated, however, is that the very formation of those identities and interests is at the heart of any political process. As Nancy Fraser (1989: p. 172) notes, “groups of women have politicized and reinter- preted various needs, have instituted new vocabularies and forms of ad- dress, and so, have become ‘women in a different, though not uncontested or univocal, sense’.” Gender is not just taken as a political point of departure, but is ac- tively constructed as an identity. It is only the explicit politicization of gender—which always reflects the practices that work to exclude or sup- press it—that makes gender relevant, and this will not necessarily occur as an organic component of the democratic process, whether that be the democratization of technology or anything else. 24 In seeking to open spaces for democratic transformation, the real challenge is undermine the “grammar of liberalism” (Young 1997) that risks letting the system versus lifeworld distinction be conflated with the public versus private distinction, with identity formation occurring in the latter. 25 It should also be clear that if we need to retain a sense of active and ongoing formation in the construction of democratic agents, then we cannot ac- cept less in our conception of the contexts in which they act. As Slater (chapter 5, this volume) persuasively argues, we cannot just simply put “things” (such as particular technologies, or specific forms of gender relations) in context, because the latter is “produced by the very ‘thing’ one is trying to put into it.” The burden on the analyst is to grasp the concrete situational dimensions of this process while keeping one’s eye on the systemic ball. Let me attempt to briefly summarize my argument to this point. I have suggested that an adequate methodological approach to disentan- gling the co-constructions of gender-technology-modernity requires a more explicit grappling with the tension—conceived here as a produc- tive tension—between system integration and social integration that is central to theories of modernity. I have also suggested that in order to engage in this sort of critical inquiry, we need to recognize that what theoretical polemics tend to set up as oppositions are more fruitfully conceived of as mutually constitutive. The interesting ground, I contend, is at the mediational level—the level of practice—which recognizes how 6641 CH04 UG 9/12/02 6:09 PM Page 122 Critical Theory, Feminist Theory, and Technology Studies 123 both abstract systemic logics and concrete situational factors join to constrain or facilitate the development of particular identities, agency, and contexts, including the fostering or blocking of democratic tenden- cies. Furthermore, implicit in the framework I have outlined is that modernity, technology, and gender are all concepts that can be instanti- ated at multiple levels in this process. The next section briefly outlines some of my current research on sexual technologies as a means of illus- trating some of these ideas. Sexual Technology and Heterogendered Bodies: Deworlding the Genitals? My current research is investigating biotechnical remedies for sexual dysfunction, and has its roots in the media frenzy over Viagra. Intro- duced to the American market in 1998, Viagra (sildenafil citrate) was lauded as the first effective treatment for erectile dysfunction. My inter- est in this specific technology was piqued when, while researching an- tifeminist interpretations of the concept of gender, I came across the following assessment of Viagra’s potential from Bob Guccione (pub- lisher of Penthouse magazine) in a Time magazine cover story: “Femi- nism has emasculated the American male, and that emasculation has led to physical problems. This pill will take the pressure off men. It will lead to new relationships and undercut the feminist agenda” (cited in Handy 1998: p. 44). I was fascinated by the manner in which a pharmaceutical product was being granted causal agency to both counter a political movement and to ground masculine identity. It seemed an extreme example of technological determinism, and a manifestation of the tendency to locate gender ever more deeply within the body, more resolutely presocial and hence less open to contestation and reconstruction. Along with other feminists, I had found myself problematizing rather than assuming the lin- gering substrate of gender: sexed bodies. Their very construction through sexual medicine, which both invents and seeks to remedy pathologies of sex, seemed fertile ground indeed for pursuing this problematization. My research to date 26 suggests that there is no point at which technology and modernity are not joined in some way in the production of sexual bodies. It is, in fact, only through attempting to disentangle the 6641 CH04 UG 9/12/02 6:09 PM Page 123 124 Barbara L. Marshall relationship between modernity and biotechnology in this concrete context that the deep ontology of sexual difference that underpins both is il- luminated. In other words, while the clinical and market success of Viagra has prompted both the scientific and popular literatures to speak of a “new age” in human sexual relations, assigning it a causal role in social change (and in particular, in affecting gender relations), only a deep ontology of gender and sexual difference made possible both the scientific research and the technological development behind Viagra and other sexual technologies. The story behind Viagra is a complex history of the manner in which sexual dysfunction has been constructed and reconstructed in relation to a range of distinctly modern phenomena—including the rationalization and medicalization of sexuality (Jackson and Scott 1997; Tiefer 1996), the increased importance of expert systems and knowledge in managing everyday life (Giddens 1991; Rose 1996), and the expansion of con- sumer culture (Slater 1997). A historical analysis shows numerous junc- tures where shifts in scientific and medical conceptions of the sexual body have occurred, disease models of sexual dysfunction have been constructed and revised, and users of (and markets for) sexual technologies have been configured. By examining the implicit social claims em- bodied in this history, the extent to which biomedical anxieties over sexual function reflect broader social anxieties about gender and sexuality becomes apparent. I can only briefly allude to some of these themes here, 27 but I hope it will be sufficient to illustrate some of the analytical themes suggested in earlier sections of this chapter. Without recounting a detailed history of sexual science, two signifi- cant shifts should be noted: first, the rise of science as the authenticating voice on what constitutes the normal and the abnormal, and second, a reframing of the abnormal to emphasize dysfunction rather than moral danger (Hawkes 1996). What is the function that sexual dysfunction threatens? Quite simply, it is penile–vaginal intercourse in the marital (or at least stable heterosexual) unit. The function is successful intercourse, which is functional for the couple, which is functional for society. It is not that this understanding of sexual function is overtly re- pressive of other forms of sexual expression or behavior, but that it operates through an increasing valorization of, and eroticization of, 6641 CH04 UG 9/12/02 6:09 PM Page 124 Critical Theory, Feminist Theory, and Technology Studies 125 marital intercourse. This has a long history, from classical sociology’s emphasis on the function of marriage in regulating passion (Sydie 1994), through the proliferation of “marriage guidance” that eroticized marital sex in the first half of the twentieth century (McLaren 1999). The increasingly scientific turn of sexology did not divest it of this normative framing. Key contributors to the modern science of sex framed their work as science in the service of the greater social good—as facilitating successful “marital coitus” (Kinsey et al. 1953) and curing “sexual inad- equacy in the marital unit” (Masters and Johnson 1966). As part of its concern to constitute itself as an authoritative voice on such mat- ters, sexual science has increasingly asserted a physiological basis for sexual problems within a medical paradigm of diagnosis and treatment. The medicalization of sexuality has rendered it amenable to intervention and management according to a biomedical model. That biomedical model accepts scientific rationality as a basic premise, which seeks universal truths about the body as a biochemical machine (Gordon 1988). Nowhere is this more apparent than in the technologization of the penis in the construction of erectile dysfunction. As one of the scientists puts it: Few fields in medicine can match the rapid progress that has been made in our understanding of male erectile function. These changes have been profound, and fundamental. Baseless speculation about the essential vascular mechanisms of erection and the belief in a predominantly emotional etiology have given way to the identification of the molecular events resulting in an erection and to effective pharmacological treatment of their alterations. The current state of the art is a pre-eminent example of what is achievable by systematic and conscientious application of basic research and clinical observation. (Morales 1998: p. xv) This neatly encapsulates the story told by the scientists—it is a narra- tive of progressive discovery, assisted by new techniques of visualiza- tion, which has allowed them to get at the truth about “the molecular events resulting in an erection.” Erectile dysfunction becomes a simple mechanical problem. As another scientist puts it, “The man needs a sufficient axial rigidity so his penis can penetrate through labia, and he has to sustain that in order to have sex. This is a mechanical structure, and mechanical structures follow scientific principles” (Dr. Irwin Goldstein, cited in Hitt 2000: p. 36). 6641 CH04 UG 9/12/02 6:09 PM Page 125 126 Barbara L. Marshall The penis, however, is only partially deworlded here; on the one hand it is conceptualized as a fairly simple hydraulic mechanism, but on the other hand it is never entirely decontextualized from the act of heterosexual intercourse. This is what makes sexual technologies such a rich site for exploring the issues I have tried to raise in this paper—the abstract systemic logic of technical rationality as it is refracted through the construction of functionally sexual bodies both depends on and shapes the lifeworld, that locus of the concrete experience of intimate relationships. While research and production related to sexual dysfunctions and their biotechnical remedies occur within an international network of scientists, not to mention a global biotechnology and pharmaceutical in- dustry, distress or dissatisfaction with sexual experience and the search for and/or consumption of technological expertise occur in very specific contexts. Particularly interesting is the manner in which these different worlds—of the scientist, the pharmaceutical company, the clinic, the sufferer of erectile dysfunction and his sexual partner—are articulated. The task of decoding these articulations has been facilitated by the very public presence of the penis and its discontents in mass-media cov- erage of advances in sexual medicine and the proliferation of mass- market paperbacks on erectile dysfunction and its remedies. A critical reading of these irreducibly cultural interpretations of technology demonstrates the extent to which heterogendered sexual bodies are a crucial link between abstract systems and concrete lifeworlds. As these cultural products—television programs, newspaper and magazine arti- cles, self-help books, advertising—consciously seek to act as translators between the worlds of science and technology and intimate relations, they not only mediate the relationship between them, but reveal much about how actors in each understand the world of the other. For example, in a segment introducing the topic of erectile dysfunction in an episode of a popular Canadian science program devoted to the penis, 28 we are introduced to an older man, his wife by his side, who tells us that when “the erections just weren’t what they used to be” they decided to “do something about it.” They proceeded to see what technologies were out there to help, and a vacuum pump now “lives” on their bedside table. Another couple is thrilled when, after unsuccessful results with previous treatments, the husband is asked by his doctor to be part of an 6641 CH04 UG 9/12/02 6:09 PM Page 126 Critical Theory, Feminist Theory, and Technology Studies 127 open-label trial of Viagra. He leaps at the opportunity, and they glee- fully tell us how she just knows when he’s taken a pill because he gets a special sparkle in his eye. Whatever the situational specifics of their relationships, and however the technologies were reembedded in those relationships, neither seriously questioned that there was a technological fix either available or immanent, and should that one prove unsatisfactory, another would come along in due course. Their faith in expert systems and scientific and technological progress was clear. This theme is consistently reiterated in case study after case study, as they are recounted in both the popular and clinical literatures. It is also clear that scientific and technological advances in the treatment of sexual dysfunction do not proceed strictly on the basis of abstract logics of rationalization or technological progress. The development of sexual technologies is premised on socially rich conceptions—albeit overly universalized and objectified conceptions—of who the potential users of these technologies are and what their motivations are. Nothing, we are told, “not even cancer or heart disease” (Melchiode and Sloan 1999: p. 17), can be as devastating to a man’s self-confidence or as dam- aging to a relationship as a faulty erectile mechanism. Again, case study after case study recounts the very tangible anxieties involved—worries about aging, about the ability to satisfy one’s partner, about the conse- quences to the relationship if they don’t. As in earlier manifestations of sexual science, technologically oriented sexual medicine has a clear sense of its social mission, which reaches far beyond the amelioration of personal troubles. Erectile dysfunction is (es- pecially given anxieties over aging populations in western societies) of potentially epidemic proportions, and poses a serious public health concern (Aytac et al. 1999; Hatzichristou 1998). It is not just a medically manageable disease, but is increasingly framed as a progressive condi- tion, with phases and early warning signs (Lamm and Couzens 1998). Remedies such as Viagra are seen as part of a broader regime of bodily risk management and “penile fitness” (Drew 1998; Seiden 1998; Whitehead and Malloy 1999). The Human Genome Project is hailed as holding out the hope of prevention through gene therapy (Christ 1998). Science has more recently turned its attention to female sexual arousal disorder—the corollary of erectile dysfunction in men is vaginal 6641 CH04 UG 9/12/02 6:09 PM Page 127 128 Barbara L. Marshall engorgement and clitoral erectile insufficiency syndromes in women (Goldstein and Berman 1998). While the initial clinical trials of vasoac- tive drugs such as Viagra for women have been disappointing, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has recently approved the first mechanical therapy, 29 and clinical trials with various pharmaceutical products, including hormonal therapies, continue. In reading the scientific and clinical literature, one cannot help but be struck by the limitless horizon envisioned. One way of reading the bodily configurations being produced here is suggested by postmodern analyses, whereby we might see technologically enhanced genitals as an illustration of “cyborg bodies” (Haraway 1991), or “hybrids” (Latour 1993). I find a different reading more com- pelling. While academics may see the proliferation of sexual technologies as a harbinger of a postmodern age, where bodies have no limits, and the nature-culture division is irreparably blurred, there is no reason to suppose that those developing or availing themselves of these technologies share that interpretation. In the case of technologizing the genitals, it is mastery over, not playful transformation of, the body that is at stake. What is being sold in these technologies is not flexible, malleable bodies—it is reliability, predictability, and calculability, all within the context of rather rigidly heterogendered performance expectations. What makes the whole enterprise intelligible is the distinctively mod- ernist framing shared by the scientists, pharmaceutical companies, physicians, and consumers: that the diligent application of scientific rationality will result in discoveries that will lead to technological innova- tions that will solve objectively defined problems, that those with problems will seek out the appropriate expertise to advise them and products to help them, and that scientific progress will result in even better solutions in the future. We may, as Latour (1993) asserts, have never been modern, but we certainly think and act as if we were. Certainly the effects of technologies produced and marketed within that frame are never foreclos- able in advance, and may, in fact, reconfigure bodies, sexuality, and gender relations in ways that are unpredictable, and which belie the distinction between nature and culture. They may even contribute to de- lightful erotic experiences and satisfying relationships. They may also 6641 CH04 UG 9/12/02 6:09 PM Page 128 Critical Theory, Feminist Theory, and Technology Studies 129 retraditionalize and renaturalize, rather than radicalize, phallocentric and gendered heterosex, and close off as many possibilities as they open. 30 The very possibility of such technologies presupposes certain assumptions about both the bodily and cultural parameters of sexuality. As Menser and Aronowitz (1996: p. 12) suggest, “pushing the bound- aries” is not the same as eliminating the materiality of sexuality. The sexual body is pivotal to processes of both system and social integration and to the tension between them. 31 It is only at the mediational level that we are able to unravel the entanglements of system and lifeworld, and open space for a critique (and transformation) of the manner in which an instrumentally rational logic is refracted through even our most intimate experiences. This is not to suggest a straightforward colo- nization of lifeworlds by strategic technical systems. This sort of one- way thinking lingers, as Judy Wajcman has pointed out, in the residual technological determinism that continues to shape empirical research on gender and technology. As she suggests (Wajcman 2000: p. 460): “while at the theoretical level, we all take for granted that gender and technology are mutually constitutive, I would still argue that the weight of empirical research is on how technology shapes gender relations, rather than on how gender relations are shaping the design of technologies.” To really get at co-construction, we need to look for the relationship between system and lifeworld (and for potential points of transformation) by grasping its instantiation through grids of power that situate bodies and subjectivities in particular (and analytically comprehensible) ways. In the case of biotechnologies of sex, this instantiation is, to put it bluntly, an extraordinarily profitable anatomization and renaturaliza- tion of cultural heterogender. This is not to suggest, however, that things could not be otherwise. It does suggest that opening possibilities for transformation requires further inquiry into the ways in which discur- sive closure on deep-rooted assumptions about sexuality and gender is enacted through technology, and how these might be opened up to fos- ter new forms of, and sites for, sexual agency. If critical research on the gender-technology-modernity nexus is to be able to envision alternative futures, then we need to be able to distin- guish what is specific and contingent about the concrete entanglements that we study, and what can be abstracted as more general and 6641 CH04 UG 9/12/02 6:09 PM Page 129 130 Barbara L. Marshall enduring. If we cannot do this, then we end up in either the postmodern fantasy world of unbridled fluidity and flux, or in what Andrew Sayer (2000: p. 722) has termed the fatalistic “nothing-can-change-until- everything-has-changed dilemma.” Is it possible to envision technological futures—including sexual technologies—that neither construct nor reproduce deep ontologies of sex and asymmetries of gender? Only, I think, if we take the technological present as an instantiation of both historically and culturally produced lifeworlds and more abstract and systemic forms of rationality that can only be analytically separated from their concrete manifestations. It is in that analytical separation that the critical space for understanding and potential transformation obtains. Conclusions The methodological principles that I have emphasized (the mutual ne- cessity of intensive explication and comparative generalization; the mutually constitutive moments of system, action, and mediational levels of analysis; and attention to the complexity of both reproduction and dis- ruption of hegemonic codes at the mediational level of recontextualiza- tion) are in fact already the defining characteristics of good, critically inclined research, including feminist research. 32 Thus, my intent in sys- tematically drawing them out here is not so much prescriptive as it is to argue for their more general applicability in critical research on technology. In suggesting this, I think that there is already much to agree on in the various communities of critical theory, feminist theory, and technology studies. That the technical is social, and the social is technical is now widely accepted. That there is a discernible relationship between gender and technology is not in dispute. To emphasize practice as the point at which the social shaping of technology occurs seems noncontro- versial. However, as MacKenzie and Wajcman (1999: p. xvi) suggest: “If the idea of the social shaping of technology has intellectual or political merit, this lies in the details: in the particular ways technology is socially shaped, in the light these throw on the nature both of ‘society’ and of ‘technology’; in the particular outcomes that result; and in the opportunities for action to improve those outcomes.” 6641 CH04 UG 9/12/02 6:09 PM Page 130 [...]... recognition of the role that Trinidadians and all the other Others have played in constructing “our” (European) modernity, a modernity to which colonial and other global histories are intrinsic and constitutive Modernity contains within itself European modernity s encounters with its “others,” including their resistances to and incorporations of modernity I need only cite the work of the Trinidadian... (whether they are Trinidadians or northern academics), but rather that modernity needs to be treated as a complex and heterogeneous accomplishment, not as a fact or assumption The ways in which Trinidadians respond to constructions of modernity (their own and others), and the ways in which they pursue projects that aim to construct themselves as modern, have to be part of the story of 1 54 Don Slater modernity. .. host to the event and felt (probably wrongly) that the eyes of all the world were on it Moreover, being the home of Carnival, their national identity hinged somewhat on their ability to throw world-class parties and festivals A local and highly ambitious new media and technology company won the contract for the website from the international governing body and did indeed produce far and away the most... Building the Internet in Trinidad Don Slater The perils of connecting modernity and technology include the danger of replicating on the side of modernity the very same false objectivities that have been so roundly deconstructed on the side of technology That is to say, if scholars are now comfortable with the social construction of technology and the co-construction of social and technical relationships, then... from the particularities of technology and modernity to more general theoretical formulations? The dangers of objectifying and totalizing the terms modernity and “technology” encompass issues of both presumption and homogenization: how do we presume to know what either of these terms mean in advance of a fine-grained engagement with a particular social configuration? And why should we assume that either...Critical Theory, Feminist Theory, and Technology Studies 131 In other words, the framework that I have outlined in this essay cannot in itself generate knowledge about modernity, technology, gender, or their mutual constitution This remains the task of detailed empirical and historical investigation that is able to enact the various moments of critical research suggested here Theory—whether of modernity, technology,... agents and forces seeking to impose their own versions of modernization, and these indeed have to be part of the picture For example, there were huge multinational interests taking such forms as the World Trade Organization and huge pressures from telecommunications companies attempting to open up and dominate the strategic Caribbean market Nonetheless, the Trinidadian framing of this situation and their... relation to which the new media seemed to reposition them At the same time, the same Trinidadian youth might be well aware of cyber discourses Their version of modernity might well include a response to these themes (without sharing or adopting them) Indeed, terms such as “Internet” and modernity and above all, the rhetorical connections that could be drawn between them—had in the first instance to... which they have to rethink their own future development, and which plays a crucial role today in redefining what modernization means at the level of the individual, household, community, nation, region, and so on As noted earlier, they were aware of much of the global discourse on the Internet, including all the hype At this level of engagement they certainly encountered and 148 Don Slater used the Internet”... of global modernity and as a means of renegotiating their relationship to it Indeed, it was virtually a synonym for the future,” and an active term in every discussion of the future (personal, corporate, or national) Hence, the emergent and heterogeneous character of both Internet and modernity must include the theoretical and strategic practices of those who have to deal with such terms in the first . both technology and modernity, of the two together, which grounds them in lived social relationships? And can we use ethnography as a basis for moving from the particularities of technology and modernity. experiences and satisfying relationships. They may also 6 641 CH 04 UG 9/12/02 6:09 PM Page 128 Critical Theory, Feminist Theory, and Technology Studies 129 retraditionalize and renaturalize, rather than. in the details: in the particular ways technology is socially shaped, in the light these throw on the nature both of ‘society’ and of ‘technology’; in the particular outcomes that result; and

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